FAQ – Observatório do Clima’s NDC

1 – What’s the point a civil society NDC? You’re not government!

Since 2015, the OC network has been developing NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) proposals for Brazil. The objective of this kind of exercise is twofold: first, to democratize the debate on national climate goals, which has been limited to the environmental and diplomatic technocracy. If the NDC is to be the springboard for changing the country’s development model, its construction must include society, which did not happen with the original proposal from the Brazilian government or with the subsequent updates to the target. The second objective is to set the ambition bar: based on the best available science, the OC shows what the country can do to make its fair contribution to combating the climate crisis. This helps society evaluate the efforts of the federal government.

2 – What do you want with the current proposal?

To help the Brazilian government fulfill President Lula’s promise to “lead by example” in fighting the climate crisis. We are proposing an aggregated target and feasible, scalable, sectorial targets based on existing technologies that represent Brazil’s fair share of the mitigation effort needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Chief among these targets is ending deforestation by 2030, a promise made by the President and an international commitment signed by Brazil.

3 – How was the target calculated?

First, the goal was to establish what Brazil’s fair share is in the global effort to reduce emissions by 2035. This approach is “top-down,” starting from what the atmosphere requires each country to do to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Since 2015, OC has used as benchmark the Climate Equity Reference Framework (Cerf), a civil society initiative that distributes the mitigation effort among countries based on historical responsibility and per capita income. Cerf has an equity calculator, which is fed with future emission projections, historical data, and information on each country’s income. However, this calculator does not include historical data on land-use emissions, which distorts the historical responsibility of Brazil and other forest countries. In 2024, we commissioned a “customized” version of the calculator, in which historical deforestation emissions were included. From there, four fair share scenarios for Brazil were established.

OC chose the most conservative of them (an emissions cap of 117 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2035), and then approached the target “bottom-up”: the SEEG1 team focused on the carbon- emitting sectors of the economy (agriculture, energy, waste, industry, and land-use change) and assessed what emissions could be reduced and removals increased in each of them within this timeframe to get as close as possible to the fair share. This approach produced the final number of 200 million net tons of CO2 equivalent, a significant rise in ambition compared to Brazil’s current official 2030 target of 1.2 billion metric tons.

For the energy sector, the numbers were derived from one of the 2050 decarbonization scenarios under development by a working group of the Climate Observatory, and whose results will be published soon.

4 – But an NDC is not just about emission cuts, right?

No. The NDC also involves measures in adaptation, means of implementation, loss and damage, and just transition. In this NDC, we have also included a chapter on oceans and coastal zones, following the decision of the Paris Agreement’s Global Stocktake and international recommendations on what the new NDCs need to include. The proposals for these sectors were defined through a series of workshops with the participation of dozens of environmental organizations and social movements that make up the Observatório do Clima.

5 – Is the target too radical?

No. Radical is a world on the brink of overshooting 1.5°C of global warming. Radical is us being on track to the second consecutive hottest year in history, with record fires in the Pantanal and Amazon, floods in Rio Grande do Sul, and heatwaves killing 47,000 people annually in Europe. All the measures suggested in OC’s NDC are feasible, scalable, and based on existing technologies. In fact, the most ambitious measures suggested – ending deforestation and restoring 21 million hectares of forests – are, respectively, a commitment already adopted by the country and the mere fulfillment of a law, the Forest Code.

6 – But isn’t it expensive to implement this proposal?

Meeting the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require a complete reorientation of the global economy and a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels. This will certainly cost money, but since 2006, science has shown that the cost of not acting on climate is much higher. Consider, for example, the US$ 12 billion that the federal government spent this year alone to respond to a single crisis caused by a single event – the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul this year, whose reconstruction will cost at least US$ 18 billion. The large-scale adoption of some of the measures proposed by OC will certainly require additional investments, and some of these will come only from redirecting other investments (for example, subsidies for dirty energy, which amount to US$ 20 billion per year). Other investments are huge economic opportunities for Brazil, such as expanding forest restoration, biofuels, and renewable energy technologies. In agriculture, low-emission technologies increase productivity and income for producers, for example. Others still bring economic co-benefits, such as reducing health costs (hospitalizations and deaths) through the mass adoption of low-emission urban public transport, which reduces air pollution.

7 – You have considered removals by carbon sequestration by agricultural soils. Isn’t that cheating, since these removals are not in Brazil’s official inventory?

They aren’t, but they should be. Since 2015, when OC built its first NDC proposal, removals by carbon sequestration by agricultural soils have been calculated every year by the SEEG team. We have observed that, over less than a decade, Brazil’s agricultural soils shifted from being net emitters to net removers of carbon. Moreover, although they are not yet part of emission inventories in most countries (in Latin America, only Colombia includes them in its national communication), removals by agricultural soils are the main premise of the ABC Plan, established in 2009 in the National Policy on Climate Change as a sectorial mitigation plan for the agriculture sector. Including them in the national inventory is a long-standing demand from civil society and agribusiness itself, which will help evaluate the effectiveness of the ABC+ Program, from the Ministry of Agriculture.

8 – The Brazilian government includes carbon removals by protected areas in its targets and emission inventories. Why does OC ignore this factor?

For several reasons, but mainly due to uncertainties about the number and a philosophical issue. Removals by protected areas have long been a point of contention between SEEG and the federal government. All countries are allowed by the IPCC and the UNFCCC to deduct “anthropogenic” removals by “managed forests” from their accounting. Brazil considers protected areas such as conservation units or indigenous territories as “managed forests” since their protection is a public policy, requiring constant efforts and money. For this reason, mature forests in these territories, which do remove some carbon, are counted as “anthropogenic sinks,” estimated in the last inventory at 386 million tons of CO2e per year.

However, this estimate is highly uncertain. Recent studies indicate that the “carbon sink” in forests like the Amazon has been less efficient in recent decades, and these removals may be lower than reported. Additionally, these public forests have been invaded and deforested, further reducing their removal capacity.

Lastly, OC considers that in a zero-deforestation scenario – where the entire country becomes a vast protected area – counting these removals would constitute “double counting.” If these removals were included in our target, the country would already be net-negative by 2030.

About the Observatório do Clima– Founded in 2002, it is the main Brazilian civil society network on the climate agenda, with 119 member organizations, including environmental NGOs, research institutes and social movements. Its goal is to help build a decarbonized, egalitarian, prosperous and sustainable Brazil, in the fight against the climate crisis (oc.eco.br).  Since 2013, OC has published SEEG, the annual estimate of greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil (seeg.eco.br).

For press information, please, contact:

Solange A. Barreira – Observatório do Clima

[email protected]

+ 55 11 9 8108-7272

Claudio Angelo – Observatório do Clima

[email protected]

+55 61 9 9825-4783

1 SEEG (seeg.eco.br) was the first national initiative to produce annual estimates for the entire economy. It was incorporated into Observatório do Clima in 2013. Today, in its 11th edition, it is one of the largest national databases on greenhouse gas emissions in the world, comprising Brazilian emissions from five sectors (Agriculture, Energy, Land Use Change, Industrial Processes and Waste). Estimates are generated according to the guidelines of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), based on the Brazilian Inventories of Anthropogenic Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases, from the MCTIC (Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications).

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